1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a drawing apparatus, and a method of manufacturing an article.
2. Description of the Related Art
Along with miniaturization and higher integration of circuit patterns in semiconductor integration circuits, a drawing apparatus which draws a pattern on a substrate using a plurality of charged particle beams (electron beams) has received a lot of attention. The drawing apparatus that uses the plurality of charged particle beams is described in, for example, WO 2009/147202. In recent years, the drawing apparatus is required to improve a throughput, and the number of charged particle beams is dramatically increased to meet such requirement.
In such drawing apparatus, for example, a plurality of blankers required to independently blank the plurality of charged particle beams are arranged, and signal lines required to supply control signals which controls the blankers are respectively connected to the blankers. For this reason, when the number of charged particle beams is increased, a large number of signal lines are used accordingly, and it is difficult to connect the large number of signal lines to the plurality of blankers. Hence, non-patent literature 1 has proposed a drawing apparatus which employs an active-matrix driving system for supplying control signals to respective blankers at different timings so as to increase a data volume to be transmitted per signal line and to reduce the number of signal lines.
In the drawing apparatus described in non-patent literature 1, the respective blankers control charged particle beams at different timings. On the other hand, a deflector required to scan the charged particle beams on a substrate simultaneously deflects a plurality of charged particle beams. For this reason, positions on the substrate, which are deviated in the scanning direction, may be unwantedly irradiated with the plurality of charged particle beams which are to strike on an identical position with respect to the scanning direction according to timing differences controlled by the blankers.    Non-Patent Literature 1: M. J. Wieland et. al., “Throughput enhancement technique for MAPPER maskless lithography”, Proc. of SPIE, USA, SPIE, 2010, Vol. 7637, 76371Z